The present invention concerns a lightweight package comprising a container and a closure for removably closing said container, said closure having tamper-evident means.
The packages that are typically used for storing and dispensing liquids such as mineral water comprise a container with a container body and a container neck, and a closure for said container.
In the following description, and as a matter of non-limiting example, the container will be described as a bottle, intended for containing mineral water. Due to safety issues, the closure comprises a tamper-evident ring that is secured to a tamper evident flange of the bottle neck, and is detached from the rest of the closure when the latter is first removed from the bottle.
Further, the bottles are generally made from an injected preform that is heated and blown in a mould to produce the bottle that will then be filled, closed and labelled. In order to carry the preform and then blown bottle along the manufacturing, filling and closing lines of a facility, a second flange is disposed on the neck of the preform/bottle, which is located at a lower level than the tamper-evident flange.
This transportation flange is also very important to ensure a good stabilization of the bottle during the screwing or snapping/screwing operation (i.e. closing operation). In recent years, the thickness of the bottle walls has decreased to save packaging material used to make them, which results in less top load resistance of the bottles. In such conditions, when the closure is pressed and screwed on lines to close the bottle, the pressure is such that the sole bottle walls could not stand this pressure. Therefore, the screwing machines include a system that holds the neck of the bottle below the transportation flange, so that the vertical—top-down—pressure applied onto the bottle during screwing, does not deform or damage the bottle walls.
In the recent times, a trend appeared to reduce the amount of packaging material used for manufacturing containers and closures, due to increasing prices of the ground materials, as well as environmental issues.
Such an effort to reduce the amount of plastics material used resulted in injection-blown new packages being marketed, wherein the tamper-evident and transportation flanges are combined.
However, there still exist a need to provide a package of the type described above which comprises even less thermoplastic material, while allowing an injection-blowing manufacturing process.